Joe Biden, Jake Tapper, and the Lampshading of America » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press | 332 pages | $32

Former President Joe Biden is old. Have you heard the news? It’s all the rave in the media today. That can largely be attributed to a new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper, former cartoonist for The American Spectator (also known by some as a CNN host), and Alex Thompson, a political reporter for Axios.

Given all the buzz around the book, I was interested in hearing more from the authors. It was just my luck, then, that the two of them were holding a talk in downtown D.C. about it, a short metro ride from me. Notwithstanding the unnerving “free Palestine” protesters outside that could be heard throughout the talk (just one day prior in D.C., a man chanting just those slogans allegedly murdered two Israeli embassy staffers), I learned something important not from the authors, but from the man sitting next to me.

He was on the older side, perhaps in his mid-sixties, and was there with his wife. I was bored in the lead-up to the event, so I introduced myself and naturally we began discussing the book. He’s a regular at these book talks, he said. We agreed how foolish it was for Biden to run again, and the man volunteered that he thought that Biden and the people around him were aware of his recent cancer diagnosis while he was in office, and that they therefore must have covered it up.

It was that statement that led me to believe that I could be honest about where I worked. “Your magazine supports Trump?” he asked incredulously. I told him that we don’t have an editorial position, but most of our writers do like the president, which earned me a multi-minute tirade about Trump’s new jet, cryptocurrencies, and all sorts of other things. Eventually, the man’s wife put a calming hand on his leg, and he decided to ignore me for the rest of the talk. Tough crowd.

My takeaway from that exchange was that Biden has so ruined his legacy that your average liberal reflexively distrusts Biden and views his attempt at reelection as ego-driven and ill-conceived.

Having the fundamental premise of your presidency so thoroughly undermined will do that, I suppose. Biden ran in 2020 on a slogan that he was leading a battle “for the soul of America” against Donald Trump. He promised, implicitly at least, that he would be a bridge to the future. With his presidency in hindsight, we can conclusively say that Biden’s war for America’s soul was a decisive defeat. He served as a bridge only between two Trump terms. 

Criticisms of Biden, out of office and brought low, have now been de-ideologized. On his own terms, Biden’s chief political goal was to “save” the country from MAGA, and his chief political accomplishment was evicting Trump from the oval office. Both of those have now slipped through his fingers, leaving what can only be described as a failed presidency. Many who had previously supported and defended Biden are not blind to those self-evident failings and are asking themselves, “How has this come to pass?”

Original Sin tries to answer that question. The book is equal parts gratifying and enraging, gripping and eye rolling, timely and too little, too late. It recounts in gripping, painful detail Biden’s mental deterioration that began as early as 2015 in the aftermath of his son Beau’s death … and it recounts it now, in 2025, after Biden and his party were politically defenestrated over the frenetic objections of the mainstream media.

I need not bore readers of The American Spectator with how the media writ large covered Biden’s decline prior to Trump’s victory. Cheap fakes, misinformation, out-of-context videos, it’s just a stutter, the list of excuses goes on. The term “gaslighting” has been thrown around a great deal in reaction to the media’s convenient evolution. But there is a better term to describe it: lampshading.

In story writing, lampshading refers to having a character in the story acknowledge an irrational or unbelievable action by another character as such in the hopes of explaining it. For example, if a notably cowardly character inexplicably becomes brave in a certain situation, another character might remark how odd that was. It draws attention to the unusual event and tells the reader that the characters in the story see it the same way you do.

The issue is that lampshading acknowledges absurdity, but it doesn’t explain it. That is what Original Sin does. It explains the how of the coverage of Biden’s decline, that being that those closest to him were lying to others and to themselves about his faculties. It does not explain the why: why so many of our elites, our supposed truth seekers who go forth without fear or favor, so credulously swallowed nonsense so obvious for so long. While Thompson specifically deserves credit for skeptically covering Biden’s health when it mattered, the media’s coverage of Biden’s decline overall, and Tapper’s specifically, was indefensible. As Tapper said to Laura Trump in an interview shortly before the 2020 election:

Ok… it’s so amazing to me – a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.

I suppose that, in isolation, it’s a good thing that Tapper said that he regrets the way he handled that interview. But it is insufficient to say that the mainstream media got the story wrong, though it did. It is insufficient to say that the Biden administration lied, though it did. It must also be said that Republicans and conservative media got the story right. And that wasn’t by happenstance, a lucky coincidence of reflexive criticism. They simply observed reality as it was plain to everyday Americans. If you had read me specifically, you would have known well over a year ago that Tapper’s “it’s just a stutter” absurdity was just that. (READ MORE FROM 2020: Tracking Biden’s Mental Decline)

Tapper and Thompson mentioned in their talk that all but one interview for their book took place after the election, when Democrats became willing to discuss Biden’s situation frankly. That is, at best, a partial explanation for why reporting of this depth and clarity wasn’t done during Biden’s presidency or during his 2020 campaign. That Democratic officials, having spiraled into hysteria at the notion of a second Trump term, did all they could to avoid damaging Biden’s electoral prospects is understandable. But one struggles to think of a reason why the supposed free and fair press would have taken such people at their word… aside from the obvious one.

Original Sin writes that the Biden presidency was a Greek tragedy, in that in seeking to avoid Trump’s reelection, it ensured it. The same observation could be made of the book. In seeking to revive the credibility of the press by acknowledging Biden’s infirmity, they are demolishing it.

Why is the media reckoning so seriously with Biden’s decline now? Perhaps they are chastened by their electoral repudiation, and are humbly rededicating themselves the impartial pursuit of the truth.

Perhaps money will start growing on trees and important GOP politicians really are trying to reach you via those annoying texts.

More pessimistic but more probable is that the press wants to rebuild its credibility so that its future pro-Democratic pronouncements are more widely believed. Biden is a spent force now, his technical eligibility to seek the presidency again in 2028 notwithstanding. He is a safe scapegoat that can be used to make the media seem more fair. And who’s to say Biden doesn’t deserve it — after all, his presidency caused Trump’s reelection. That, more than anything else in the eyes of the media, is Biden’s real original sin.

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